“Eventual Benefits: Kristevan Readings of Female Subjectivity in Henry James’s Late Novels” examines the constitution of female subjectivity in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age, The Portrait of a Lady, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. In these five novels of James’s major phase, female characters often find themselves in social or familial circumstances inimical to the autonomous psychic growth. Such subjections are particularly devastating for the children or adolescents of the first three novels. Likewise, James’s expatriate American women negotiate social and pecuniary objectifications by the Europeans they encounter; consequently, they deploy counteractive tactics to surmount their diminution and install their selfhoods. My investigation of the protocols subsidizing the enfranchisement of these itinerant women proceeds in the framework of Julia Kristeva’s theories. Recruiting her postulates of abjection and melancholia, intertextuality, motherhood and pregnancy, forgiveness and foreignness, this dissertation scrutinizes the disparate and resistant strategies of James’s female characters and arrives at a conception of female subjectivity as a continually deferred process.